Loss was part and parcel of sacrifice. With sacrifice, you acted counter to your own interests, and gave up the right to bemoan that fact. Complaint sullied the offer, it amounted to taking back that which you had given. Yesterday, at the gallery, Sarah had wanted to be arrested; the arrest was the sacrifice. Only in that way could the act of resistance finally be awarded a crown.
I looked at her, her light-footed, chaotic dance amid the tables, the landscape of waste, and waved until she saw me. She was startled. She put her tray down on a table and walked over to me.
‘You can’t come here, Ludwig! You can’t see me like this. .’
She shrugged in dismay and looked down at the white cafeteria uniform.
‘I figured, I’ll go take a look. . see how you’re making it through the day.’
She looked at her watch.
‘I’ve got at least another five hours. I’m exhausted.’
I nodded.
‘But it was. . it was worth it,’ she said. ‘With you.’
We were silent, embarrassed suddenly — we’d known each other for such a short time, still knew so little about each other. I got up.
‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have come and bothered you.’
‘It’s okay,’ she said.
‘I have to get back. Maybe I’ll see you later.’
‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘What are you going to do?’
‘Oh, things, this and that. Play the tourist.’
‘I have to get back to work,’ she said, suddenly agitated. ‘Rush hour!’
On my way out, there was a tap on my shoulder, and a question accompanied by a nervous smile.
‘Will you come to see me tonight?’
Happiness, pouring out like light.
‘Yes, I’d love to,’ I said.
I walked all the way back to Santa Monica, to the hotel at the seaside, lighter than I had ever walked before, immune to dust and heat, actually running at times. Hamburger joints and car washes and shoals of Latinos in the shade of a taco stand; I clenched my fist and choked back an ongoing shout of triumph. This was not the world as I had known it. This cascade of sensual delights that came tumbling into my soul. Back at the hotel, beside the pool, I witnessed the glimmer of splashed droplets, their sensational beauty. If this too was the world, alongside the one of drabness and habit, then which one of them was the exception? Why was this beauty usually hidden from our eyes? Why all the veils, all the trouble it took to remove them? I thought about Abgrund — was that what he was doing, tearing aside the veil? Revealing the holy of holies? Was my desire to see everything, to reduce mysteries to riddles and riddles to answers, akin to his? Was that the message ghosting about in my blood? I had to backtrack, to return to the whispering that accompanied his act of violence, to experience that which perhaps could not be understood, but which could be seen.
The cabbie who took me to my father I paid with dollars my mother had given me, making me a child of both. Brightly colored flyers lay on the pavement before the gallery, the remains of this morning’s demonstration, the daily boycott. The dark tarpaulins hung motionless, as though they surrounded the black stone of Islam. It had to be irony, a joke on the part of the gallery owner, to exhibit a work of extreme desecration with the trappings of a shrine. The cleaving of the stone. The space which served as the office was in the back of the gallery, bathed in caustic light. At a desk was the man I had seen yesterday. An old, bedraggled Labrador lay at his feet. I wanted to talk to that man, but first I had to work my way past the bespectacled secretary, who had adorned herself for the occasion with all the disdain in the world.
‘Ma’am, could I. .’
She raised her hand.
‘Just a minute,’ she said.
She rose from her chair and slid a folder back into the rack above her head. Then she looked at me over the top of her glasses, which struck me as a strange habit, looking at people over the top of one’s glasses.
‘There’s something I need to ask that gentleman over there. Mr. Steinson, is it, or Mr. Freeler?’
‘Neither, actually,’ she said. ‘And you are from. .?’
‘I’m not from anything. I just have a question.’
The man looked at us.
‘What can I do for you?’ he called out.
The secretary resumed her position at the Mac, her fingers with their long, painted nails hovering over the keys like a pianist before the concert starts. The man slid his chair back and came over to me. The dog lifted its head with a sigh.
‘You wanted to ask something about the show?’
‘About the maker, actually.’
‘Have you seen the catalog?’
‘Yes. But it didn’t say whether he’s still working on his project, on Abgrund.’
‘As far as I know, he’s still there.’
‘But how do you get hold of his work? Does he bring it himself, or do you go and fetch it?’
The dog came up behind the man, leaned against his legs. The look on the gallery manager’s face changed, became cautious, distant. Why did I want to know all this? he asked. Perhaps he suspected that I was a demonstrator, a disturber of the peace. I asked, ‘Is it possible to meet Schultz, as far as you know? That’s what I’m interested in.’
‘It would be easier to schedule a meeting with the President, I’m afraid. I can’t remember. . no, no interviews, nothing.’
‘I saw the film,’ I said, ‘yesterday. I. . What I’m curious about, actually, is how you should look at something like this, about what kind of art you’d call it.’
He nodded.
‘I remember a happening,’ he said, ‘sometime in the late Sixties. It was the first time I saw an artist destroy his own work. A funny guy, very mild-mannered, really. Wolfgang Stoerchle, he drove a car over his own work, his paintings. Died quite suddenly. Otherwise. . well. It’s fuck-you-work, in fact. About ten years ago the guys from the Survival Research Lab did a show at Joshua Tree. They blew up things in the landscape, accompanied by deafening music from Einstürzende Neubauten. A bit of a failure, really. A pile of debris went “blooey”, and that was pretty much it. Mark Pauline still likes to blow up things, he even lost a hand in an explosion, but that was by accident. I don’t know whether Schultz saw the stuff at Joshua Tree, whether that gave him the idea. And, of course, you’ve also got Roman Singer’s Action Sculptures. .’
‘The Chinese,’ the girl behind him said without looking up from her terminal. ‘The Chinese do explosions, too.’
‘Fuck-you-work, all of it,’ the man said. ‘But anything like Schultz, there’s never been anything quite so, so grand. And so malicious.’
‘You think it’s malicious?’
‘Oh yes, definitely. No doubt about it.’
I thanked him for his time and said I was going to watch the film again.
‘No problem.’
I parted the tarps for the second time and went in. Sitting on the front bench, bathed in blue light, was an older couple. Again I submitted myself to his prophetic rage, cryptic as a language without vowels. The camera homed in on the workers far below as they carried off stones, the wind rasped in the mike. He ridiculed them.
‘Created for obeisance. To have gods above them, not to be gods. The radical imperative. Every man is an abyss. . but the audacity needed to be someone else’s abyss. . Unflinchingly. That’s what it is to have backbone, to be someone else’s abyss. .’
He began making his way down, gray sky above, the exhausted greenery lurching below. Schultz was humming, you could hear the gravel crunch beneath his shoes. He sang a line of the song, repeated it at intervals. Denn alle Lust will Ewigkeit, will tiefe, tiefe Ewigkeit. He stopped, aimed the camera at a higher spot. The lens slid across the lesions.